Turkish Culture

SIRNAK, Turkey, In one of the more prominent of a series of recent rape scandals in Kurdish dominated southeastern Turkey, at least four girls aged between 12 and 14 were found to have been sexually exploited by state officials, including an assistant headmaster at a school and an employee of a local police department, over a period of two years in Siirt, a town located in a province plagued by fighting between the Kurdish insurgency and Turkish army. Schoolboys and shopkeepers were also involved. Lawyer Meral Danis-Bestas, who is involved in prosecuting…

Welcome to the Turkish Language program website at Syracuse University. Turkish has been taught in the Department of Languages, Literature and Linguistics since 2003 and since 2004 both Turkish 101/102 and Turkish 201/202 have been offered. About Turkish Turkish belongs to the Turkic language family and in terms of the number of speakers it is the largest in the Turkic family, with over 70 million speakers. Turkish is the official language of the Turkish Republic, where it is the native language of over 90% of the population. Turkish is also spoken…

By: | | AirWolfHound/Flickr Features include a food court with Turkish fare, games for children, a storyteller, ballet and folk dance performances and concerts. The festival will open on Wednesday with an air show from Solo Turk, an aerobatics display team that is part of the Turkish Air Force. Starting at 4pm, the group will perform daring maneuvers with F-16 fighter aircraft, leaving trails of white smoke in their wake. Expanding ties The first Turkish cultural festival here comes amid deepening business ties between the Qatar and Turkey. This…

It was the Reagan era. I was young. I thought Americans were the world champion flag wavers. Jeesh, was I wrong. At the time, the Armenians had much to be bitter about with respect to the current Russian occupation, the transfer of the Karabaugh to Azerbaijan (60 years earlier) and the Turkish genocide (eighty years earlier). Still, there was an element of hysteria to their nationalism. I saw grown men weep at the site of a battlefield where the Macedonians defeated the Armenians. I was moved, until I learned the battle took place in 400 BC. I…

Mental Health issues are still considered to be things that should not be talked about and kept very much within the family as it is considered to be a shame on the family. However I have noticed within the last year that it is now been highlighted in Turkish newspapers as a problem that needs to be brought out into the open, which can only be good news. I think it will take a few more years before Turkey gets to the same place in social acceptance of mental illness as the rest of Europe, America etc. Here s a link to an encouraging article that…

Dubbed into colloquial Arabic, censored of its raciest scenes and renamed Noor , the series was . Unlike Western soap operas, it focused on an extended family, a strong tradition in Turkey and the region. In 2008, the show’s final episode drew an estimated 85 million viewers over the age of 15, , including 50 million women, a figure that represents more than half the adult women in the Arab world. Like Magnificent Century , the show violated conservative cultural norms. Some Muslim characters drank wine with dinner and engaged in premarital sex…

Every summer during my childhood my parents put me on a plane and sent me to spend a few weeks with my grandmother, in the bourgeois seaside town of Yalova, whose long boardwalk was filled with bored families who littered the ground with the spat-out shells of sunflower seeds. My grandmother’s one-bedroom apartment was a temple to widowhood. The doorbell still featured my grandfather’s name, and a morbid mechanical calendar was stopped on 5 May 1975 – the day he had died (before that, it was set to 10 November – the day Atatrk died). The curtains…

PHNOM PENH – A 51-year-old Turkish man, Aydin Goktepe was arrested on Wednesday by anti-human trafficking police in Phnom Penh for allegedly buying the virginity of two 14-year-old girls, police said. The mother of one of the victims was also arrested for having sold her daughter to the Turk, while a second Cambodian woman was arrested for her role in brokering the deal, according to Keo Thea, Phnom Penh anti-human trafficking police chief. Mr. Thea said that Aydin Goktepe was arrested at around 6:50 p.m. at Malis guesthouse in Wat Phnom commune…